The migration of an ectopic, impacted tooth over the skeletal midline of the jaw is a rare phenomenon called transmigration. The most frequently performed therapeutic options are surgical removal or leaving the ectopic tooth impacted in the jaw bone. Just a few papers report successful alternative therapies like orthodontic treatment and autotransplantation. There are schemes that make the feasibility of these alternatives a subject of discussion. However, waiver of integration of the ectopic tooth into the dental arch is the most common option. Painful teeth with associated pathology must be removed, but these symptoms are very rarely accompanied by transmigrant teeth.

To learn more about the factors that enable the successful integration of the ectopic tooth into the dental arch in its correct position, the patient records of 14 patients, who were treated at the Department of Cranio-, Maxillofacial and Oral Surgery of the Vienna General Hospital, were evaluated. Three of them were treated successfully with orthodontic therapy, among them for the first time a patient with a lingually positioned transmigrant tooth. Beyond that, a review of the literature of the past 60 years was made in order to compare the papers with each other and with the newly acquired data to find out, if existing therapy-schemes are confirmable. It is shown, that previous assumptions are only partially confirmable.